This blog is an archive of the reports I am doing as part of a study on the impact of communal violence on the education of Muslim children (with particular reference to Gujarat), funded by the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism, 2006.
Many people have asked me why I am doing this project. How will my reports help the children, the families, who are suffering five years after the Gujarat riots of 2002? What will they gain by reliving the horrors of yesterday today, to a reporter whom they probably will never see again? Wouldn’t it be insensitive to ask some of the questions that I would be asking? These are things I have worried about as well. As a reporter, I imagine my job is to document the plight of people, highlight it to the world, and hope that someone will read it. It seems a grossly insignificant role to play, and perhaps it is.
I have no clear answers to any of the questions but the closest reply I have got is from Philip Gourevitch’s book on the Rwanda genocide, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. He writes, “Like Leonitus, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge – a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world; some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy.”
The title of this blog is from the U2 track New Year’s Day.
(Kindly do not republish, reprint or reproduce in any form anything from this blog. The copyrights of the reports rest with the publishers in most cases.)
